Here’s How We Found Success By Using A PR Tactic For Agency&nbspOutreach

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

This article highlights a direct marketing campaign we launched at Supremo. Yes, old-fashioned direct marketing may well be the devil, but I wanted to put this forward to the community because I think the campaign can be recycled for PR and outreach campaigns, too.

Before I get into the details of what we did, it’s probably good to start with who we are and why we launched this campaign. Supremo is made up three directors, each of whom has a different strong suit: marketing, design and development.

While working as freelancers, often on the same projects, we decided that as a team we could create something greater than the sum of our parts. An agency was born.

We had a handful of clients that we could pull over from our previous work, but we needed more. While the long-term plan was to focus on inbound marketing to grow our business, a medium to long-term plan wasn’t going to help us in the short term to get more business. Two of us had domains with fairly decent DA, and we’d redirected them to our new site, but it was going to take time to see this all filter through to positive search rankings and organic traffic.

We needed work.

We settled on a direct marketing campaign that would be highly personalized and focused.

The kind of work we eventually want to do is big content pieces, focusing on things like data visualizations and interactive infographics. The challenge: It’s hard to get that kind of work unless you can present a solid track record of success, which, being a startup, we don't have.

For this campaign, our aim was to try and tap into PR agencies that offered content marketing and outreach services, but didn’t have any designers or developers working in-house. We identified 30 PR agencies that met this criteria in Manchester, where we’re based.

We wanted to sell white label web design and development services to PR agencies, but these agencies had never heard of us. Also bear in mind that our budget was limited to $600. So, how did we grab their attention? Keep reading to find out.

The Willy Wonka campaign

We wanted to send our targets something that would encourage them to take action and engage with us on our platform. We all love the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book and film, so we decided to use the "golden ticket" theme to entice people to visit our website.

First, we identified 30 fancy-looking chocolate bars that each had a sleeve where we could insert a golden ticket. We found the chocolate at Melt.

Next, we needed to create a golden ticket, or better yet, find someone online to make customized golden tickets for us. We found that person on Etsy.

Stacy produces Willy Wonka tickets for parties. We got in touch with her to ask if she’d make 30 for us and customize each one. She agreed. We created copy for the ticket based on the original text. Each ticket was addressed to the individual we were targeting at the agency and contained a unique code. Here’s the copy we used on one ticket:

“[You] are the lucky finder of this Golden Ticket from Team Supremo. Present this ticket at the website gates of Supremo – Head to www.supremo.tv/wonka-golden-ticket and enter this code [...]. In your wildest dreams, you could not imagine the marvelous surprises that await you.”

OK, we may have over-sold the proposition a little, but it’s a bit mysterious and creates an element of intrigue. How could you resist heading to the website to see what was there and, hopefully, find out who sent this chocolate bar?

The next element of the campaign was the web page. We wanted to create a personalized page for each target so that they landed they landed on the initial page where they entered their code. They would then be greeted by name and presented with a video telling them about who we are and how they would benefit from working with us.

We didn’t end up creating the personalized video for each target, as we weighed the benefits of doing that against the added production time and judged that the minimum viable product was to get one video made for all targets. Once the target entered the page, they could watch the pitch video from us, read our selling points, then fill in their details if they wanted us to contact them by phone to organize a meeting.

Because each user had a unique code, we set up an email alert for when that code was entered. After a short period of time, we emailed them to ask about the chocolate if if we hadn’t heard from them yet.

The results

Within two weeks of launching our campaign, 14 people had entered the codes, and every one of them had played the pitch video. That's a response rate of 47 percent, which is significantly better than any direct campaign we've ever been involved with. And we now have have meetings lined up with three of our targets.

Fourteen PR agency directors visited our website and watched a video of us pitching our services directly to them. We didn’t force them to visit nor click the play button. Rather than pushing our business on them as traditional direct marketing does, I believe we earned their attention.

The thought and effort we put into the campaign was clear. We were obviously a small agency. These chocolate bars were nice, but we’d bought them online and they weren’t branded up as Supremo. We couldn’t have possibly sent this to hundreds of targets. The people we sent this to were thoughtfully selected and our approach made that obvious. I think that’s the reason the campaign was a success.

And what about the budget? Thank you for asking. Well, here’s the breakdown of costs:

Chocolate - $265

Packaging - $36

Golden ticket - $230

Postage – $53

That adds up to a total cost of $584.

Bringing the campaign to outreach

The reason I wanted to share this campaign with the Moz community is that I think it could be a great one for bloggers for use for outreach. Now, there may be those of you who say, “This is nothing new. The Willy Wonka campaign is merely a PR campaign, and outreach is just a term used by SEOs for PR”.

Well yeah, that may be the case, but there are two points I want to make:

The campaign was effective without being expensive. Any small business could find $600 to run this campaign using a big piece of content with a lot of potential.

Outreach is simply another worked for PR, but outreach related to digital marketing often amounts to emailing a few people. A campaign like this one goes much further to build the type of connections that cannot be earned via email.

This post represents my call for us to invest as much creativity and energy into our PR as we do in our content. I can honestly say the outreach for our Willy Wonka campaign was by far more fun than spending days scheduling personalized emails to bloggers.

I hope you'll try this technique (or a similar one) for your brand.

About Liam_Curley —
Liam is the Managing Director of Caelum Contracts, a roofing company based in London. He's also the founder of Bean Label, a site where he creates videos sharing independent speciality coffee shops across the UK.

One other thing, Moz -- can I quibble with the headline? This is not a "PR tactic" -- this is "direct marketing." Publicity and direct marketing are two different things within the promotion mix. A more accurate headline would be "Here’s How We Found Success By Using Direct Marketing For Agency Outreach."

When I saw this statement, I thought you were either trolling or completely unaware of traditional marketing. But your YouMoz post proved the exact opposite. Well done!

The truth is that there have always been only five marketing strategies: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity. Those together comprise the promotion mix under the 4 Ps.

Direct marketing is using "direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships." The only difference is the channel. Direct marketing can be done over the postal mail (as in your example), social media (Twitter lists), e-mail (subscriber lists), and more. Channels change, but the strategy never does.

(Another example is publicity, which is "gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media." There are roughly twelve different publicity tactics, and a few if them are tie-ins with news events, events, or holidays. Publicists have always done this, but certain marketers today have rebranded it as "newsjacking" as if it were something completely new and different.)

My point? Too many people proclaim that "marketing has changed" in one way or another, when in fact little has changed. Most of those marketers are selling something to other marketers. (To help the community to learn more about traditional marketing, I created an extensive, step-by-step marketing flowchart process here on Moz.)

As Liam has shown the Moz community, thinking in terms of traditional marketing strategy and will always yield the best results over thinking of buzzwords such as "content marketing" or "social media marketing" or "newsjacking" or whatever the flavor of the month is now. Best practices exist for a reason.

Hey, Samuel, thanks for the feedback. I'll be honest, you being the PR guru in the Moz community, you were one of the key people whose opinion I was hoping to get on the piece and I'm delighted that you commented. I was having a bit of fun with the 'direct marketing may well be the devil' comment ;)

For me the big point you touch on is - "channels change, but the strategy never does'. Markets change. The way we shop, the choices available, the way we engage with one another. But, the fundamental principles behind why we make purchase decisions are firmly connected to psychological patterns which will have changed little in the past 50 years. So, sticking with the direct marketing campaign and definition, the philosophy behind it doesn't change, whether it's 1985 or 2015. What changes are the tools and channels available to directly connect with the individual.

The only element of your comment I'd disagree with is about thinking in terms of traditional marketing and it yielding better results than content marketing, social media marketing... I don't think it's a case of picking one or the other. I love how BrewDog go about their marketing. One core mission, followed by a series of tactics to deliver on that mission. I think combining traditional with modern is the way forward.

Liam, thanks for the compliment -- but I'm certainly not the "PR guru of the Moz community." I'd give that honor to Lexi Mills. She has spoken at Mozcon and elsewhere several times on the topic and is giving this Mozinar soon.

The only element of your comment I'd disagree with is about thinking in terms of traditional marketing and it yielding better results than content marketing, social media marketing

My apologies for not being precise. My argument is not about traditional marketing vs. content marketing or social media marketing or whatever. My argument is that "content marketing" and "social media marketing" do not exist as functions unto themselves.

Take any well-known example of "content marketing." Oreo's Super Bowl tweet was a publicity stunt. Dollar Shave Club's first commercial was an advertisement. Red Bull's space jump was publicity. A contributed article to a publication is publicity (or, in certain rare cases, an advertisement). A webinar is personal selling.

Again, all marketing is doing elements of the promotion mix: some desired mix of direct marketing, advertising, publicity, personal selling, or sales promotion.

Social media is a collection of communications channels over which marketing campaigns are executed. Oreo's Super Bowl tweet was a publicity stunt that was transmitted over Twitter. Dollar Shave Club's advertisement was a YouTube video that was transmitted over Facebook. If I export a list of people who tweet about widgets and tweet to them, that is doing direct marketing over Twitter. And so on.

If we really want to do our best as marketers, then we need to rethink everything that we think we know and go back to learning what marketing has done all along.

You deserve a huge thanks for so consistently beating the "great SEO is really just great PR" drum. As evinced by the number of agencies now hiring PR folks, I think people are finally listening/realizing as much.

Ronell, thanks so much for the nice words! But I just wanted to clarify something.

"Great SEO" is not all just "PR." Everything that is a technical or on-page issue -- sitemaps, international SEO, mobile usability, server log analysis, and countless other things -- is certainly SEO.

My argument has always just been that everything that we have called "off-page SEO" is really just good marketing by other names -- doing, for example, advertising and publicity campaigns that build brands, increase engagement, and earn links. All of those things that build brands that deserve to rank highly.

My simple formulation: Build, promote, and publicize a site that will delight its target audience. Everything else will fall into place as Google increasingly becomes an algorithm that thinks like a human being.

Everything that is a technical or on-page issue -- sitemaps, international SEO, mobile usability, server log analysis, and countless other things -- is certainly SEO.

"off-page SEO" is really just good marketing by other names.

Couldn't agree more! Blurred lines between what constitutes SEO for me, due to the fact that the job role and skill-set required has changed so much. Building search traffic requires on-page SEO, but not solely on-page SEO. However, that doesn't mean that every campaign or activity conducted 'off-page' that contributes towards improved organic traffic should be labelled as SEO.

Nice project Liam, we did something similar a while ago with USB bottle openers and it did quite well for such a low spend - http://backlinks.com.au/using-direct-mail-outreach-to-gain-links-mentions-and-more/ I love the creativity of the willy wonker chocklate idea though!

Hi Paul. Regarding the video, it's not great, but in my opinion it's good enough. We could have spent more time on it to improve it, but I don't believe it would have had any impact on the overall goal. The fact that we had one was better than not having one and the purpose of it was to show that we were real people.

Thanks Eric! As I said above to Brodie, this post was written a few months back and shortly after launching I parted ways with Supremo. I didn't personally follow up on the meetings, and I'm not sure what the Supremo guys did from there with them, so I can't answer the question regards the meetings.

Regards the feedback, it was 100% positive from each potential target that responded. Anyone that gave feedback was complimentary of the way that we reached out to them, and if they choose not to meet up, it was for other reasons (i.e. no design work, friends have design agencies so it was unlikely they'd be able to pass us work, etc.). I'd definitely recommend it as an approach for getting meetings with new customers or getting content in front of top-tier journalists or bloggers.

As a big fan of direct mail, I'd be interested to see how the campaign pans out for you in the future. Were you able to close deals from the 3 meetings? If it was profitable, are you going to send out another set of Wonka bars? How could the campaign have been improved?

Just don't make the same mistake I've made. Years ago, I did a campaign of 68 highly targeted mail pieces, along the lines of what you did. I too, was able to get a great response and set up several meetings. To this day I'm still generating revenue from that campaign, yet I failed to send out another batch!

Here's a couple of my own thoughts you may or may not consider... The background music kind of drowned out your voice. Also, I liked how you personalized the landing page with "Hi Mozzer." However, I would make this more prominent as I'm assuming this would typically be the recipient's first name. This will warm them up to your video a bit.

Thanks for the feedback on the landing page and music. As you'll be able to tell, I'm a complete amateur on making videos so it's useful to hear your thoughts on the music.

Out of interest, I know it's easy to say with hindsight, but why didn't you send another batch? What do you think the reason was at the time for not going again?

This piece was written a few months back, and unfortunately shortly after launching I parted ways with Supremo. I didn't personally follow up on the meetings, and I'm not sure what the Supremo guys did from there with them.

For me, the big success was in the response rate. We targeted a group of people that didn't know who we were, and everyone of the 14 responses that visited the landing page watched the video of us pitching the service. From there, there are several variables that you could look at as to whether it went on to deliver revenue, and with hindsight I'd change several elements to improve conversion. For example, you could look at the service offering, the type of companies that we targeted, etc. But, the campaign itseld, the concept of using the Willy Wonka tickets to get a target list of people to a landing page and pitch them an idea or business opportunity, that I would do in exactly the same way as I think it worked really well.

When compared to a postcard or sales letter, the mailer you did wasn't easy or cheap. It took a lot of effort and time which is exactly why I didn't send another batch. Plus, I don't meet fact to face with prospects very often unless I'm at a conference or something. The mailer I did years ago had the same call-to-action as yours... a meeting.

Awesome job! This was a creative way to tie the promotion into something fun. I think a big reason why people fail at marketing is because they don't know their audience, they're not unique, and they blend in to the crowd. That's no different whether you're online or offline. You guys did a really nice job of separating yourselves from the crowd, create suspense and intrigue, and succeeded in drawing in a group of people who understood that creativity. How did the follow up meetings go? What kind of feedback did you get from those potential customers about your campaign?

Good project Liam, I'd also be interested in how many people actually got back to you.

I'm currently in the process of creating my own custom direct mail packages that will be sent out to various newspapers and music websites. Hopefully i'll be posting a similar case study on here next year. I think direct mail, when do right can be extremely effective. I mean who doesn't love opening a parcel and finding something unique to just them!

Re the video its pretty bad tbh, your pacing doesn't sound natural, was you using a teleprompter app or something? Also the video was slightly out of focus and wobbly in some places.